I hjave a customer with a dental office and they have 3 rooms where they want the monitor, keyboard and mouse on the other side of the room. The cable installer ran cat 6 cables from the computer to the other side of the room with as the previous IT service had this in mind.

I need help selecting the remote kvm hardware. What is a good brand? and What connection type should I buY. They have dell desktops using usb monitor and usb keyboard but the monitor is using vga. These machine are due to be swapped out in 18 months so they would likely get dells with dvi or display port or HDMI for the monitor connection and I wanted to be able to use these same remote KVM boxes. Should I buy the dvi type and get the dvi to vag converters?

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If I understand you correctly you have a computer at one end of the room but you want the monitor/keyboard at the other end of the room and there is CAT6 cable run from the computer's location to where the monitor needs to be? Is there more than one CAT6 cable run?

Here is what I would do. I'd go out and get a USB over CAT5 extender (the USB 1.1 ones run about $100, the USB 2.0 run quite a bit more, but for mouse and keyboard you really don't need the speed of USB 2.0), and I would couple that with a VGA over CAT5 extender for the monitor. Keeping it modular allows for a cheaper transition later when they upgrade the computers to ones that use DVI or HDMI.

Try this then, keep in mind though this one does not actually pass the full USB over to the other side of the room, instead it acts as a USB to PS2 adapter for mouse and keyboard. I've used them before, they work great.

Or this if you need audio and USB 2..0 (though it excedes your budget).

The problem with a single box solution is when you try to change over to a digital video solution, the price jumps to around $1k per set. The modular suggestion I made would allow you to curtail this cost of the upgrade by keeping the USB extender and merely switching out the video extender with the digital one.

One other thing to note about any of these extenders is that they are not IP device, they merely use CAT5 cable to connect the units. So they should not be plugged into any of your network equipment (routers, switches, patch panels etc). If you do then you will get some very odd network behavior or possibly find that your network stops working all together. Though, you probably knew this already.

Attn: IT Kid; Since your customer has already run CAT6 cabling to the three offices, I would agree with JRC and use a VGA extender now and migrate toward a DVI-D extender in 18 months. I would imagine resolution type would be fairly important to you, so I would recommend a solution such as our ACU075A-USB. This carries a resolution of 1280 x 1024 @ 75 feet (22.8 m).

The Tripp Lite/Minicom kit has all cables included ( as well as the Transmitter/Receiver, power supplies ) to accomplish your Cat6 "stretch" across the room. See pg 4 below for the final set up diagram. This is a physical connection still, just as if you had the monitor, kbrd, and mouse directly connected to the computer....you're just extending using the Cat6 the previous installer put in for just this type of devive. http://www.tripplite.com/shared/techdoc/Owners-Manual/933192.pdf

$100, $110, $180 = $390 (plus taxes), and you can cut down on the keyboard to something less expensive to make budget including tax. I know you planned on using the ethernet cable to achieve this, but perhaps it's not the best way to go if your distance is short enough to support it.

SoftDent, Dentrix, or EagleSoft? =)

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